A New Start at Microsoft

Posted by Brian Clark on June 6, 2017

Cloud Developer Advocate

I started a new role this past week at Microsoft as a Cloud Developer Advocate. In this role, I’ll be involved in the communities around JavaScript, Node.js, Angular and Security and connecting them with the relevant awesomeness in Azure. I’ll also be collaborating with the excellent teams that build the products in Azure to ensure it’s creating the best experiences possible.

What this all means is I’ll be telling the story of how things like Node.js and Angular fit in Azure. You’ll be able to hear about it through conference talks, blogs, social media, podcasts and more. Overall my goal is to always be learning and sharing the knowledge to help empower everyone in the community to achieve more.

Starting at Microsoft

Fun and exciting is the best way to describe my first week at Microsoft:

The first day was orientation which includes lots of helpful information and inspiration. The orientation folks did a great job of getting everyone hyped up while sharing important details about the company. My biggest takeaway from this session was the culture evolution at Microsoft.

There were four key factors around the culture that were shared with us:

Growth Mindset

Customer Obsessed

Diverse and Inclusive

One Microsoft

“Growth Mindset” stood out to me as the core to the change in the culture. A great way to describe it is through the following comparison with a “Fixed mindset”:

Posters of this are found in meetings rooms throughout the Microsoft campus

This really hits home as it means I’m joining a company that will support me throughout the ups and downs in my career. It means colleagues will be open to having discussions around how we can improve together, as a team. We will no longer just accept the status quo and excuse things with “that’s how we’ve always done it.”

That proved to be true when I met with people from various product teams with focuses on Azure, Visual Studio Code, docs.microsoft.com, Node.js and TypeScript. They all were eager to work together to ensure we’re providing the best products and experiences for customers. Each of them were inviting any and all feedback they can get from both the community and internally.

All of this left me feeling that it’s an amazing time to be a part of this company. This is not your father’s Microsoft anymore. Microsoft has changed and is continuing to change in a positive way. It is apparent that the culture is at the core of that change.

I’m excited about this new role, being a part of this great company and getting to know more of you in the community. I look forward to what the future holds.